Text shortage spurs creativity

Schools must adapt

Posted: Friday, September 03, 2004

By Alisa Marie DeMaoalisa.demao@onlineathens.com

"You have to be creative," Joycette Bell tells her class as she explains an assignment - and it's an admonition that's stood Bell and other Clarke County teachers in good stead as they've waited for new textbooks to arrive this year.

A month after the start of school, the Clarke County School District is still waiting for most of its new science textbooks and many of its new English and math books. While many teachers have been able to use older textbooks and classroom sets of texts to make do until new books arrive, they've also used other teaching methods to fill the gaps.

"The four second-grade teachers here got together and did a lot of brainstorming," said Bell, who teaches one of the second-grade classes at Alps Road Elementary School. "A lot of the work in the first few weeks is review, so we had to go out and find activities that would let us do that."

Working with the teacher's text of the second-grade math books, they put together activity centers such as a flashcard station where students could work in pairs, computers with sites that reviewed math skills and erasable boards that students could use to set problems for each other. Alps Road Elementary, a participant in a National Science Foundation grant program to reform math and science education, also sought suggestions from grant participants at the University of Georgia.

Elsewhere in the school, Wanda Claxton's third-grade class has been using the computer programs for an accelerated math program at the school in place of workbook activities, and Claxton has been using the district's new language arts curriculum to teach out of "real books" - chapter books - rather than the standard textbook compilation.

"We're doing real reading and real writing," she said.

When workbooks arrive, she'll use the sections the class already has learned as review.

The late books are a particular problem for elementary schools, where many of the books are "consumable" - used up by students each year so that new ones are needed.

Bell managed to get seven books from an unused class set of math books that was divided among the second-grade teachers at Alps Road. While their math textbooks arrived last week, they're still waiting for workbooks.

In other classes, teachers have been able to use older textbooks until the new books arrive.

"I've talked to people who think we don't have any textbooks in the schools," district spokesman Mike Wooten said. "We didn't throw all the textbooks out at the end of last year. We have textbooks - but they may not be new textbooks."

Many of the district's new textbook shipments were delayed this year because of a financial shortfall - district staff had to ask the board last month for an additional $94,000 to pay for pending and unordered shipments.

This year's budget for textbooks was about $366,000, down from a usual budget of $380,000 to $382,000 because of the current budget crunch. The price-tag on new textbooks this year is actually about $534,000, which includes $196,000 for new high-school English books and $109,000 for new middle- and high-school foreign language books.

About $229,000 was needed for new math, social studies, science, fine arts and other reading and language arts books because of student population growth and to replace lost and damaged books.

"There are two separate problems," said Maxine Easom, principal at Clarke Central High School. "The first is with the new books we need because of the new textbook adoption. While that's not good, we do have the old books. The second problem is the books that we ordered because we needed more books in a class - if you had 50 students in a class last year, and you have 70 this year, you need extra books. And then you have 20 kids in a classroom who don't have books."

High-school math books have been a particular problem - of 284 books ordered, only 30 had been received by Thursday, Wooten said. Science books also have been coming in slowly - 763 have been ordered for middle schools and 121 books have arrived, while 170 have been ordered for high schools and 32 books have arrived.

Altogether, about 80 percent of the math books that have been ordered have arrived, as have 88 percent of the social studies books and 63 percent of the English and language arts books, Wooten said Thursday. Only 34 percent of the new science books have come in.

All of the books have been ordered, and shipments are arriving, although arrival time is dependent on the publishers, Wooten said. One shipment was delivered to the district's warehouse Thursday - books must be unpacked, checked and inventoried before being sent out to schools. In at least one shipment, publishers sent the wrong books, Wooten said.

District staffers are drafting a new procedure for inventory and ordering of books that would start the process earlier and would call for a quarterly inventory of textbooks to keep up to date. A draft version of the process calls for the school board to approve funds and orders to be placed in May.